Tragic Sign-Off for a Golden Girl

Jessica Savitch: 1947-1983

Near its end, her life seemed to carry a storybook warning: ambition may lead to power and fame, but the path beckons to a precipice. And her death in a freak accident last week, at the age of 36, will probably give her a place in pop iconography, another televisible symbol of burning drive that guttered out. The reality did not perfectly fit the already emerging legend. But NBC Newscaster Jessica Savitch left resonances.

She had had a meteoric rise. Spurred on by a father who died when she was twelve, the aggressive Pennsylvania golden girl with the pale blue eyes seemed unstoppable. One of her Ithaca College journalism professors told her, "There's no place for broads in broadcasting." So she worked her way up from radio disc jockey and newsreader to TV reporter and local anchor in Houston and Philadelphia; she put in 16-hour days to eliminate any chance that newsroom chauvinists could tag her as an electronic bunny.

Before being hired by NBC in 1977, she said to an associate, "I'm going to be a network anchor, and I'm going to do it fast." In short order, Savitch was a cool and collected on-air presence in American living rooms. She covered the 1980 political conventions, anchored NBC's Saturday edition of the nightly news and was a featured correspondent on the network magazine shows Prime Time Sunday and NBC Magazine. Her greatest exposure came from 60-second prime-time updates, now called NBC News Digest, which she began in 1981.

At 33, her position secure even in the nervous network world, she remained driven and dedicated, a perfectionist who rarely relaxed. In newsrooms she was sometimes jokingly referred to as "Jessica Savage." The former general manager of Philadelphia's KYW-TV, Alan Bell, recalls, "There was a show-must-go-on quality to poor Jess. In the grand tradition of laughing on the outside and crying on the inside, when the red light went on she'd be out there giving 158%."

When the light went out, Savitch faced an overload of personal tribulation. A 1980 marriage to Philadelphia Adman Mel Korn ended in indifference in less than a year. A few months later, she married Gynecologist Donald Payne, 45, then suffered a miscarriage. In August 1981, she discovered Payne, who had been tormented by physical and mental illness, hanging from a basement rafter.

Savitch became increasingly isolated after the tragedy, and her career seemed to stall. She took a partial leave from NBC to host the PBS program Frontline, and later lost her Saturday anchor slot. There were rumors that she had turned to cocaine to fuel her still relentless pace. Friends deny it. "Work is my narcotic. I get high from it," she told a colleague. But some fellow workers wondered, notably after she slurred words and stammered on a recent Digest spot.

Perhaps Savitch was beginning to sense that she might never be fully admitted to the magic circle: Rather, Brokaw, Jennings. But she did not relent. Last year the newscaster published a Pollyanna autobiography, Anchorwoman, that seemed like an extended press release. Says Barbara King, who helped her with the book: "She thought if she could renew the old glory, one of the networks would offer a bigger and better job." None did, but a new deal with NBC reportedly raised her salary to nearly $500,000; the network was considering her as a substitute on Today during Jane Pauley's upcoming maternity leave and as a principal reporter of the 1984 political campaigns.

Friends say she was full of plans again. She was finding happiness with her new boyfriend, Martin M. Fischbein, 34, vice president and assistant general manager of the New York Post. A week ago last Sunday, the couple left a restaurant in the Bucks County resort town of New Hope, Pa. It was 7:15 p.m., and they had not been drinking. Moments later, in a heavy downpour, Fischbein apparently mistook a poorly marked towpath for the restaurant parking-lot exit. His rented station wagon tumbled some 15 feet into the water-and mud-filled Delaware Canal, coming to rest upside down. When the car was discovered four hours later, Fischbein was still strapped behind the wheel, and Savitch, along with her pet Siberian husky, lay in the back seat, drowned.

SENTENCED. Truman Capote, 59, author (In Cold Blood) and sardonic, falsetto voice of the glitterati; to three years probation and a $500 fine for drunken driving; in Southampton, N.Y. Capote had been driving with an expired out-of-state license, and the Long Island judge barred him from applying for a New York State driver's license for six months. The judge also directed the writer to continue alcoholic counseling. Said Capote: "I pleaded guilty to this thing to get it out of the way, even though I know I wasn't drunk."

INJURED. Jerry Dunphy, 62, $450,000-a-year anchorman of Los Angeles' most popular local news program (KABC-TV's Eyewitness News); when four gunmen in an Oldsmobile pulled alongside his Rolls-Royce convertible and opened fire on him and his companion, Studio Makeup Artist Sandra Marshall, 36; in Hollywood. Dunphy, who is resting comfortably in the hospital, was struck by a bullet in his neck and one in his left arm; Marshall was shot in her right arm. At week's end no motive for the ambush had been discovered.

DIED. Rodolfo Siviero, 72, Italy's national art sleuth whose life mission was to recover his nation's stolen treasures, particularly those pilfered by the Nazis; in Florence. An agent of the underground Italian resistance during World War II, Siviero traced at least 2,000 works of art throughout the world in his lifetime, and saw that they were safely returned. Next year the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence will open a special museum with 200 pieces of Italian art, mostly paintings, that the relentless Siviero recovered after they vanished from the looted, private collections of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering.

DIED. Frank W. Epperson, 89, concocter of the Popsicle; in Fremont, Calif. On a cold San Francisco night in 1905, eleven-year-old Frank left a glass of lemonade on his back porch and awoke the next morning to find the drink frozen solid around a spoon that was in it. Nineteen years later, Epperson patented his "handled, frozen confection or ice lollipop." Dubbed the Epsicle, it was quickly a success, but Epperson sold his patent in 1929 to a small company that changed the name to Popsicle. "I was flat and had to liquidate all my assets," he said years later. "I haven't been the same since." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.